Personal, design, inspiration, interests.

Interview with Veerle Pieters

It must be very weird for you, the reader, seeing all these interviews being posted at once (not literally). There’s actually an explanation for that, and the reason I’m doing this is because I used to have a design blog in my mother language, Spanish. That blog died for several reasons, I decided not to continue with it, but what I can tell you is that I created it when I was between 15 and 17 years old approximately; can’t really remember. When I opened CreativeNauts I thought it would be nice to bring back these interviews that costed me some time to get, even if, looking now at how the questions were written, they make me feel ashamed of my former self… I wasn’t good at English, tried my best and probably embarrassed myself in front of the four people I got to interview, I embarrassed myself in front of the final reader and didn’t speak well of my blog. But hey! Time passes and I’m here to post them even with those little details at large, like the detail here being that the questions are THE SAME I made to Hongkiat Lim!!!

Aclaration

This post was published on my previous blog which was sold, deleted and forgotten.
So now it’s time to bring it back to life and available for your reading as I know you
will make a good use of it. If you think it’s obsolete, now you know the reason.

This one was also in 2009, a period when I was a candid follower of design blogs, blogs you’ve probably read as well; I’m talking about Abduzeedo, Noupe, Creativenerds and so on. Veerle came to me when looking for a very specific Illustrator (Adobe) tutorial with the bloat tool, I noticed the content had a nice personal touch and decided then to place a small interview to the owner, Veerle. She had little time as I caught her in a busy time, but after a month I sent the questions, she replied and I remember I was so happy haha, my admiration for people is really something.

Now, who’s Veerle Pieters?

Well, old sports, she’s a Belgian (Bruges) graphic designer (and web designer as well) who started as a member of the print business in 1992. When she was young, she loved to draw and illustrate, spent holidays on France. She founded Duoh! in 2000 and, overall, her blog has reached a long list of followers and you can feel her approach pretty quickly.

And now, the interview

1- Why did you create a blog, what inspired you to?

I started using a blogging software tool called pMachine Pro after reading about in a Mac magazine. The main reason was not blogging itself but learning how to build templates in HTML and CSS because I was still using tables for lay-out at that time.

2- Tell us about your style of design, and why do you have that style.

It is something that has evolved over the years and it reflects my personality. But it is not something I chose on purpose it came naturally. What I mean is that I didn’t wake up one morning and decided to follow that style.

3- Who do you consider to be your favourite designers?

There’re a few people that I look up to like Scott Hanssen of ISO50, James White, Monica Calvo…

4- What is your favorite blog?

5- You really love Adobe Illustrator, but what’s the story behind that?

I’ve started out with FreeHand but switched to Illustrator because of circumstances. I’ve used Illustrator since version Illustrator 88 so you don’t change that after being used to it all those years.

// Question 6 was not answered, and I can’t remember what it was. //

7 – Would you care to elaborate on that dream you have about “Making the interweb a better place”?

I try to get people inspired and interested in good design and quality coding so that they start thinking about things like accessibility for example. My dream is a modest one namely changing the web one site at a time and by guiding people to the right resources to learn things properly 🙂

8- What do you think is your best work to date?

I guess that still has to come… I’m always eager to tweak things even when I really liked it. No design is ever perfect 🙂

9- For you, what is the meaning of the word ‘design’?

To me design is about communication. When you use something and you don’t notice the design because it feels natural you’ve succeeded in bringing the message across.

10- What would you say to people who want to be designers or good bloggers?

The best advice is to never loose the hunger to learn because that is really the passion that is needed to succeed in our world. The learning process never stops. Blogging is something that you only should start when you are in it for the long run because it is hard to keep things going.

Thank you so much for reading, and again, apologies to Veerle and you guys, I had to edit my badly written questions to proper English, with better grammar and spelling. Not to mention the facile and puerile way I used to do these interviews. I’m not sure if “but… I was 16!” is a good excuse, :P.

2 thoughts on “Interview with Veerle Pieters”

[…] I’ve been having this month. If you are looking for an explanation on this, please check Veerle Pieter’s interview, as it says, this and the other 3 interviews were made in 2009 (approximately) so, that would […]

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